Winners for What's Your Muse Exhibition
- Chris Gold, Gallery Chair
- 8 minutes ago
- 4 min read
The York Art Association is pleased to announce the award winners for What’s Your Muse?, our latest exhibition exploring the many sources of artistic inspiration. With 34 participating artists, the free exhibition offers a vibrant look at the ideas, places, emotions, and experiences that spark creativity.
We extend our sincere thanks to our juror, Leah Limpert Walt, for her thoughtful review of the work and for selecting this year’s award recipients. Leah’s perspective as a painter and educator brought great care and insight to the judging process.
We invite everyone to stop by and experience the exhibition. What’s Your Muse? will remain on view at the York Art Association through April 19.
Meet the Judge: Leah Limpert Walt
Leah Limpert Walt is a painter and instructor living and working in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Her work is in private collections in the United States and Germany. Leah’s work explores the narratives underlying the collective experience of life and the unfolding of time. Themes of meaning and purpose and mystical connections that bridge gaps in human knowledge infuse the imagery of her paintings with remembrance and possibility."
Honorable Mentions:
Penguin Determination by Jeannine Dabb
Muse Description:
I am an abstract expressionist interdisciplinary artist with an interest in painting, sculpting, printmaking, collage art, photography, writing, and poetry. My art comes from a place of observation. I am an ethnographer. My art is a response to my immediate surroundings and is also influenced by the world, including environmental, political, racial, income inequality issues and the lack of human empathy and compassion. I create art, because I have to, it is me reacting to direct narratives, but it is also my internal response to the world around me. We are living in complicated times that require nerves of steel to navigate. My response to all the chaos, is to create art. I search for solace and peace, which comes from the act of painting. I try to capture intimate moments, or imaginative narratives that creates a connection with the viewers.
Divine Grace by Jim Mackey
Muse Description:
The Muse for “Divine Grace” comes from several sources… Robert Rauschenberg and Joseph Cornell; plus my love of ancient religious icons. I particularly love the structural shapes on religious icons that i have had the pleasure of seeing in Museums.
Third Place: Rabbit Time by Stuart Kendig
Muse Description:
I have long been interested in viewing narrative art. This work is the first in a series of paintings that I am doing that don’t provide a narrative. Instead, these images invite the viewer to create their own narrative. I think of this painting as a book cover for a story that is yet to be written. I have provided visual suggestions to create interest and the observer can imagine a personal narrative to satisfy their curiosity.
Judge's Comments:
Work without a story is an interesting thing to be compelled to make. In most cases, the artist follows a bread trail that leads to a complete unknown. Symbols combine in harmony or juxtaposition and lead the artist and the viewer on a journey they were maybe surprised to take. There may be questions, emotions, inspirations that awaken an aspect of them they were unaware of, or hadn't been in touch with in a while. It may help the poet complete that 10 year old unfinished poem, jolt the novice novelist into their big break book, or spark a story from the lips of a child that reminds the mother of a dream. The narrative artist provides the world with an image laden with symbolism that activates the conscious and subconscious mind and offers an opportunity to engage with the ancient and irreplaceable heritage of storytelling. Like a vessel for the muse to commute from place to place and touch more than on piece, one medium, or one artist, it is an expansive creative force reaching into unknown possibilities just like it did as it came into being
Second Place: Spotted Joe-Pye, Salt Springs State Park, PA by Phyllis Disher Fredericks
Muse Description:
Muse, a word that conjures up a spirit, a magical being that provides creative inspiration. If that be the case then my muse is nature, light, air, and space. When standing alone in the midst of a woodland I am transported to another plane. I have a creative need to record that place, that time, that day. There is an urgency to do so before it all changes.
Judge's Comments:
Having a bordered artwork gives the artist an opportunity to contain a composition or break the boarder and activate space between the viewer and the artwork. This artist has chosen to do the latter, and has broken the border with the foliage in this piece, which places and create the sensation that we're on step away from entering into the field in the foreground. This sense of space has been magnified by the depth of the woods, and the sky peaking between the trees within. There is somewhere to go once we enter. When the viewer does take that step closer, they are met with the scent of pine and transported even further into the moment the artist wanted to preserve before it is lost in time. Their choice in composition, in subject, and in medium work together to take us into a place that maybe we've never been, but will inevitably persist in us.
First Place: NW2 by Nancy Boileau
Muse Description:
A little box filled with small things was my muse. The label on the lid, in my deceased husbands handwriting, was “
NW2.” Interest peaked, I eventually determined the things in the box were parts to a Northwestern model railroad engine. An avid railroader, my husband often disassembled thing, leaving countless little pieces in little boxes. It’s my turn to reassemble those little thingys into a new story.
Judge's Comments:
Like a collaboration with their late beloved from across the veil, this artwork channels combining forces into a unique concert. The intricacies of the mechanisms feel like trying to piece together or make sense of grief, or loss, of the meaning of it all. Set atop a background of gossamer fluctuations, particles and fabric, like the foundations of the physical world and creation itself - a reminder of how layered existence and experience are. How natural it is to create something to symbolize a great feeling; and a musing and meditation on that feeling sparked to life by a box of parts handed lovingly across time and space is a beautiful testimony to creativity, connection, and inspiration.
